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Physiological Genomics Research Program at UT College of Medicine

Welcome to the Physiological Genomics Research Program of the University of Toledo
College of Medicine. This Research Program at UT is lead by Dr. Bina Joe, who is a
Professor in Physiology and Pharmacology, well-recognized for her research primarily
in the Genetics of Hypertension. Notably, she was awarded the 2010 Young Scholar Award
from the American Society of Hypertension.

Genetic studies of complex polygenic traits such as blood pressure are primary conducted
with the view to map, identify and ascertain the magnitude of change imparted by each
of the underlying contributing genetic factors. The scope of such studies conducted
in humans alone is thwarted by several confounding factors including genetic heterogeneity,
low penetrance and uncontrolled environmental factors. Rat models of hypertension
have served as tools to study the genetic control of blood pressure with minimal interferences
from these confounding factors. These include the inbred hypertensive strains, the
consomic strains and the congenic strains and genetically engineered models including
transgenic and knockout rats. In our laboratory, we have constructed congenic strains
derived from the Dahl salt-sensitive (S) rat as genetic tools and located and fine-mapped
several quantitative trait loci to regions containing as few as two annotations to
<30 annotations. Ongoing work is focused on detecting variants and assigning causation
to the variants responsible for the observed effect on blood pressure. To this end,
we are combining state-of-the-art molecular biology techniques and large scale-omics
and nextgen sequencing technologies with the development of novel rat knockout and transgenic
models. These studies in rat models are expected to serve as potential leads for translational
genetic analysis of human essential hypertension.